Storytelling: Storytelling passes oral histories, traditions, beliefs, and values throughout generations, creating a collective story of all Indigenous people in the community. Testimonies: Testimonies are a formal means of presenting oral evidence about, often in the case of Indigenous communities, painful events and experiences. The Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative uses this method through their Story Map, blog, the UNH Undergraduate Research Conference, short films, and interviews of Indigenous collaborators.

These histories can be for non-Indigenous members of formal bodies like tribunals, the non-Indigenous public, or the Indigenous community. These projects are as follows:Ĭlaiming: “Claiming” or “reclaiming” Indigenous identity often involves intensive research and the writing of Indigenous histories. A number of the twenty-five projects can be utilized in the work of the Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative. These projects work toward goals of social justice and reclaiming Indigenous culture (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). In setting an agenda for planning and implementing indigenous research, Smith shows how such programs are part of the wider project of reclaiming control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.Linda Tuhiwai Smith, an Indigenous woman (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou) and Professor of Maori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, writes about twenty-five indigenous projects that are part of a larger program of Indigenous research.

Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research methods. From the vantage point of the colonized, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked with European colonialism the way in which scientific research has been implicated in the worst excesses of imperialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized people. Professor Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Zed, 1999) explores the intersections of imperialism, knowledge and research. Her leadership represents the pioneering work of Maori scholars and activists which inspires indigenous and sovereignty work internationally. In New Zealand she has been central to the development of a tribal university, Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, and to the nationwide movement for an alternative schooling system, Kura Kaupapa Maori. Professor Smith works as a consultant to the development of aboriginal and indigenous studies at five major universities in Australia and Greenland. Linda Tuhiwai Smith is Associate Professor of Maori Education and Director of the International Research Institute for Maori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Thursday February 24 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Decolonizing methodologies